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The Corporate Push Into Virtual Worlds: Page 3 of 8

Disquieting Emptiness
It's 3 p.m. Pacific time on a Saturday afternoon, and the Toyota car showroom is deserted. Not a customer -- or salesperson -- in sight. At a time when auto dealerships in the real world would be hopping, no one has bothered to show up to take a virtual Scion for a spin.

Although popular in the real world, Toyota's virtual Scions largely go driverless in Second Life.

At the Reebok store, there's much the same disquieting emptiness. Neat stacks of shoeboxes are displayed in the center of the football field-sized room. Oversized posters that scream the Reebok brand line the walls. But aside from a horned creature who flies in for a moment, looks around, flicks his long tail and leaves, this hall of virtual commerce is devoid of activity.

Indeed, Linden Lab's own traffic counter shows abysmal records for the corporate sites. Reebok's total traffic is just 741. The Sears store created in partnership with IBM: 964. The Toyota showroom tops the corporate destinations at 1,955. By contrast, Second Life's Elements Lounge -- one of the more popular sites -- has seen traffic of 133,217.

Although by the end of January 2007 nearly 3 million "residents" had registered for Second Life, the blogosphere hotly debated the relevance of that number, as one person can create multiple avatars. At any given time only between 10,000 to 25,000 avatars are in the world. And of all the people who sign up for Second Life, only about 10 percent bother to return to become permanent members of the community, according to the world's creator, Linden Lab.

In the cosmopolitan scene in Amsterdam, one of Second Life's more highly traveled destinations, avatars mingle in the street and chat in a variety of languages.

"Compare these numbers to popular multi-player games like World of Warcraft, where between 33 percent to 40 percent of its 8 million users are online at any given time, and you start to get a sense of how sparsely populated Second Life is," says Castronova. "If you applied the benchmarks of other multi-user role-playing games to Second Life, then more than 800,000 residents should be online at any given time. There's nothing near that happening."